Have to respectfully disagree. As has been admitted by himself and his teammates who were on the roster prior to Cael's arrival Bubba had no intentions of jumping on board with Cael's vision. Bubba and Cael both made the right decision.
Molinaro: I’m sure Bubba will argue against this, but the thing about Cael is he’s the same with everybody. That’s what I liked about him most and that’s what made him change the culture so fast. He was consistent. He wasn’t picking and choosing which guys to discipline.
Vallimont: Cael came in and cracked down on some rules and a curfew. He had coaches come to make sure you were in class. If you weren’t there, you had to come into the wrestling room late at night on Fridays and do extra study hall hours.
The main thing I can remember is that under the former coaching staff, Bubba had a little more freedom. He would sometimes show up late to a lift. Cael came in very strict and was not really messing around with people tip-toeing the line, and I think that may’ve been a point of conflict between them. There was a bit of tension that was visible every now and then, but I don’t think anyone knew how serious was until he left the team.
Jenkins: [After the 2009 season,] some injuries were starting to catch up to me and I needed a break. I knew I needed to hit reset physically and mentally to get back to the podium. I made some personal moves to make sure that if I needed to redshirt, I would in fact redshirt for the first half of the season.
I purposefully didn’t show up to classes, so I would be academically ineligible. I had extra credits, so I calculated my ineligibility and eligibility to still perform in January for the Big Ten season, so I could at least have that half a year to get healthy and get back to being that wrestler I came to Penn State as. I forced my redshirt year and possibly my departure from Penn State when Cael realized I was ineligible for the first half of the season and that we had different demeanors.